What’s different though is that it feels like Microsoft is more interested in working with us as a partner whereas Apple has always given off a vibe of just sort of dealing with us because they have to. Maybe that’s a little sour grapes, but as a developer it was a nice change.

[…]

Overall though, Microsoft seems to be embracing open source in new and interesting ways that the old Microsoft never seemed to care about. Previously when they open sourced a piece of technology it’s because they were no longer interested in it. Now, key pieces of functionality that the future of the company is based on are out in the open.

[…]

Build allowed me three days to immerse myself in technologies that I know almost nothing about. I came away impressed with it too. For all its past faults, the New Microsoft is doing things that are on the cutting edge of technology. Their Rx extensions library is everything I hope ReactiveCocoa could be: a fully functional extension to the core C# language built and maintained by Microsoft. Their unit and integration testing story for Windows Phone is light years beyond what either Apple or Google offer for their respective mobile platforms.

But where the new CEO makes a difference is that leadership has caught up to where Microsoft employees already were. They can be honest, with themselves and others, about the company’s role in the world. They can stop wasting time trying to recapture those days of monopolistic dominance and instead concentrate on building great things for the future, for the many-platforms future.